“How very wet this water is.” — L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz
Do you ever go “Duuuuh, I could’ve thought of that!” after someone told you something?
Good ideas become obvious after the fact, but that’s the entire point.
After, not before.
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“I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.” — Winston Churchill
When I recently went to the time-traveling mailbox at my lake house, I found this letter from Winston Churchill inside. Apparently, he really took this question on Quora to heart. Here’s what it said.
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When our math teacher in high school introduced a new topic, what happened next would always follow the same pattern:
Steps 3-5 of the pattern would then repeat until the majority of the class understood the new concept and the “More examples!” screams slowly died down. Then we moved on.
Since I was often part of the group who got the gist the first go around, I’d be bored for the remainder of the lesson, waiting for everyone else to get the joke so we could continue. In the meantime, instead of listening, I tried to come up with more of my own examples.
I didn’t know it back then, but as it turns out, I was doing something right.
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“Knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.” — Peter Sage
If you read a lot, but seem to forget most of the information you so eagerly soak up, this is for you. I’d like to give you 3 things today:
Let’s go!
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Has anyone ever asked you for directions and you were too embarrassed to admit you don’t know? So much in fact, that you tried to tell them where to go regardless? Just to save your face?
“Uhhh, I think it’s that way.”
That’s what most career advice feels like these days. Nobody has a clue, so everyone goes with their best guess — which is everybody else’s best guess also.
Hence, we live in a world of depressed millennials, which is permeated by two ideas:
If you’re fine with putting your life into the hands of chance, then you can stop reading right now.
Or, you can flip both of these ideas on their head.
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One of the most common conversations I remember from sitting in high school classrooms is the “Why should I remember this?”-debate.
“Why should I memorize where carbon is in the periodic table of elements, if I can just look it up any second on my phone?”
“Why should I remember when the Vietnam War started, if it’s on Wikipedia?”
“Why should I…”
It’s true that memorizing facts simply for the sake of memorizing facts has become useless.
Except for the one case where it hasn’t:
Being interesting.
tl;dr: I created a free, 14-day email course that’ll help you build a daily reading habit. You can sign up here.
Back in July, I asked the people on my Four Minute Books newsletter what their biggest struggle with reading was.
Here’s the unanimous answer:
It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
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In October 2016 I started a Master’s Degree program at the Technical University of Munich, which is widely ranked as one of the best universities in the world.
This semester, I’m taking a class about strategies of global organizations.
Basically, it’s supposed to teach us how to think like the CEO of a global company, which I expect a rare few of my fellow students to become (don’t look at me, I wanna do my own thing).
Today, I’d like to start an experiment by sharing what I learned from the first of six chapters of that class. If the feedback is good, I’ll turn this into a series.
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I’m sorry Mum.
But I have to tell you something.
I have OLD.
Obsessive Learning Disorder.
There’s no cure for it.
If you’re born with it, you’re stuck with OLD for life.
My question today is: Do you have OLD as well?
Maybe we can be friends.
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Trampelpfad.
Want me to say it again?
Tram-pel-pfad.
Want me to actually say it?
The first half of the word “Trampel” comes from the verb “trampeln” which means to stomp.
As in “When we told the kids they weren’t allowed to watch TV, they ended up stomping up the stairs in frustration.”
The second half of the word “pfad” simply means path.
Therefore, a Trampelpfad is a path, which has been created by people stomping along the same trail.
You can most often find a Trampelpfad in the woods, and it looks like this:
Why am I telling you this?
One, because Trampelpfad is an awesome word and there’s no proper English word for it and two, because it will help you remember what I’m about to say next.
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